Blue Sky Freedom

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BfK No. 169 - March 2008

Cover StoryThis issue’s cover (photograph by Kamil Vojnar) is from Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child. Siobhan Dowd is remembered by Julia Eccleshare. Thanks to Random House Children’s Books for their help with this January cover.

Blue Sky Freedom

On 16 June 1976 and the months that followed, young black South Africans made history through their uprising against apartheid. Blue Sky Freedom opens a year earlier. Feisty 15-year-old Victoria Miller and her family are branded ‘bloody white liberals’ by the police. Maswe, son of their black cook-cum-nanny, is on the run from brutal Sergeant Kloete. Victoria hides him, falls in love and takes a vital political message to Godiva, a contact in the black township. Godiva is hostile to Victoria who is now rejected as a ‘Kaffirboetie’ by her (white) best friend. When Maswe is captured and fatally tortured, Doctor Miller refuses to sign the death certificate and the family flee overseas. Victoria returns in 1977 and attempts to join the armed underground wing of the African National Congress. Godiva gives her a hand grenade that Victoria throws at the police station where Maswe was killed. Victoria goes on trial, convinced that she can expose Maswe’s murderers to the world.

Halberstam writes with a pace that will grip her readers. But, unfortunately, there are serious lapses in research that raise issues of credibility in this historical novel. I only have space to mention a few. ‘Maswe’ – ‘unclean’ in Tswana – is a strange name for a child and his surname ‘Salwise’ certainly isn’t Nguni from the Eastern Cape where the story appears to be set. Maswe supports Black Consciousness. He tells Victoria, ‘We have relied too long on well-meaning whites’. So why does he come to the white suburbs rather than relying on his black comrades? Furthermore he trusts Victoria to take his message into the black township. These contradictions are not explored and Victoria seems naively free of any racialised consciousness about her relationship in a deeply racist society. When Godiva openly tells Victoria ‘I am going underground’, we have reached Hollywood fantasy. Halberstam is strongest on the relationships she recalls from childhood, like the white child’s dependence on a black mother’s love. It is important that today’s readers hear stories of apartheid’s appalling abuses and the struggle against it, but authenticity has to be the bedrock.